Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Thursday, October 21, 2004

Go Sox!

Saturday Evening, October 25, 1986: I huddled with about a dozen of
my fellow MIT graduate students (and a couple of faculty) watching
game six of the baseball World Series in a Toronto hotel room right
before the start of FOCS. The Boston Red Sox led by two runs with two
out and none on in the bottom of the tenth against the New York Mets. One more out
and the Sox would win their first championship since 1986.

The Red Sox didn't win the series that year and failed to return
until this year. After an amazing
comeback against their rivals, the New York Yankees, the Red Sox
will host the first game
of the World Series on Saturday against the St. Louis Cardinals.

By far baseball is the favorite team sport among American computer
scientists (at least of those that care about sports at all). Why?
Mabye because it's a discrete game with a small state space. At Fenway
Park (Boston's home field) they use lights to give the number of ball,
strikes and outs in unary notation. The game has many nice
mathematical properties and not just the myriad of statistics. For
example, it is a theorem of baseball that at any point in a half
inning the number of batters is equal to the sum of the number of
outs, the number of runs scored and the number of men on base. Proof
by induction.

The real reasons I love baseball are less tangible. Both a
team sport and a one-on-one contest between pitcher and
batter. A strategic game dealing with balancing
probabilities. Suspense on every pitch. And much more.

By far the plurality of baseball fans in our field seem to root for
the Red Sox. Probably because most of us spent at least part of our
academic career in the Boston area and Boston takes its baseball far
more seriously than any other city. In full disclosure, my favorite
team is the Chicago White Sox but I root for the Red Sox in their
absence.

Nothing beats attending baseball game live, especially in Fenway. Alas
I never managed to attend a world series game though I've come very close.

October 14, 1992: The Pittsburgh Pirates won the National League East
and the World Series was scheduled to open during FOCS in
Pittsburgh. I wrote for and got tickets to the first game if
Pittsburgh made the series. In the NLCS
Atlanta scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth of game 7,
meaning Atlanta and not Pittsburg would host the series. When Cabrera
hit the single scoring those final two runs, I sat staring at the TV
and cried.